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Syria hands over first batch of chemical weapons

TONY EASTLEY: It proved to be harder than first thought but finally the first chemical weapons have been transferred out of Syria on board a Danish ship.

The transfer marks the start of a process that was agreed to after last year more than 1000 people were killed in a chemical attack in the capital, Damascus.

The Assad government, which was blamed for the attack, later agreed to surrender its chemical weapons stockpile.

Hayden Cooper is our Middle East correspondent.

Hayden Cooper, good morning. How did this first transfer take place?

HAYDEN COOPER: Well it took place under a fair degree of secrecy. We didn't find out about it until it had been completed.

What happened was the Danish commercial ship which had been tasked to carry out this transfer managed to dock in Latakia, which is a port city in Syria. The chemical weapons had been transferred there - only a small amount of chemical weapons. They came from two sites within Syria.

They were then loaded on board the Danish ship and now the ship is back in international waters. It's being guarded by a convoy, really, of Russian, Chinese, Denmark ships and Norwegian ships as well.

And basically they'll now wait for more chemical weapons to be delivered to the port of Latakia and then they'll do it all over again.

TONY EASTLEY: When we talk about chemical weapons, Hayden, what sort of material was collected?

HAYDEN COOPER: We don't know for sure yet, Tony. It's very early and I find it hard to believe that they would actually tell us. But one likely element being mentioned already is mustard gas. The urgency here is for the UN bodies to collect the most dangerous chemical weapons first. There's something like 1,300 tonnes of chemical weapons in the country. Now only 20 tonnes of that is some of the most dangerous substances, but obviously the priority is to get them out first.

Mostly this is a symbolic event more than anything. I mean, other kinds of weapons killed more than 100,000 people in Syria over the past few years, so the removal of chemical weapons won't be celebrated too loudly. But it is significant because it shows a level of cooperation between the Assad government in Syria and the West.

TONY EASTLEY: What happens to the chemical weapons now?

HAYDEN COOPER: Well after the Danish ship collects more weapons, whenever they are delivered to the port, they will be taken to Italy. We don't know where yet but there will be a port volunteered by Italy. An American ship will meet the Danish ship there and the weapons will be transferred across to the American ship. It will then go back out into international waters, probably somewhere in the Mediterranean, and the weapons will be the destroyed.

Now there is a deadline for this to happen. The UN obviously wants it to happen pretty quickly and, as I said, it wants to destroy the most dangerous weapons first. But at the moment the deadline to get rid of Syria's chemical weapons and to destroy them is June of this year.

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